Capitalism is so funny we forgot to laugh. In this course we will be reading plays drawn from over three hundred years of mannered comedy, some of the most coarse, witty, perverse, lively, and stylish works in English literature. From Early Modern Restoration comedies modeling the libertine rebel Rochester like The Man of Mode, The Rover, The Way of the World, and the Beggar's Opera, to High Modern high camp fascinated by the figure of Oscar Wilde from Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience to The Importance of Being Earnest to Noel Coward, up to Late Modern work from Joe Orton and Jennifer Saunders resonating with the space oddities of David Bowie: we will not only be reading these hilarious and hellraising plays, but staging their key scenes in class for one another in an effort to inhabit them more viscerally. The premise of the course is that these plays stage efforts to satirize and cope with definitive contradictions of modern capitalism but also with paradoxes of corporate-militarist societies and cultures more generally, especially what I will call the plutocratic paradox (a meritocratic rationalization and enactment of aristocracy), the patriarchal paradox (a sexist, heterosexist, cissexist homosocial order that must disavow its queer possibilities), and the planetary paradox (a nationalist project impossibly comprehending ramifying multicultures in "the cultural" while embedded in a global nation-state system in which it impossibly competes via the racist war-machine of "the social"). Readings from political economy and cultural theory from Hobbes, Smith, Marx, and Mill, Pateman, Berlant, and Edelman, Williams, Sontag, and Bruce LaBruce will help us grapple with the plays and the spectacle they make of themselves. Consider the course a contribution to Urbane Studies.

Provisional Schedule of Meetings:

Week One (September)

1 Administrative and Course Introductions.

Week Two

8 Lawrence Dunmore, dir. "The Libertine"

Week Three

15 Fontenelle, Digression on the Ancients and Moderns. Hobbes on Equality, on Power, on Laughter. A selection of poems by Rochester.

It's rather funny to hear Tony Blair decry the "Alice in Wonderland" politics of Corbyn's Labour supporters when you really have to go through the looking glass to see Tony Blair as anything but a Tory.

Saturday, August 22, 2015

Last year, HP announced it was building The Machine -- a computer meant to leap as far above conventional modern systems as a high-end Xeon workstation is above an IBM mainframe from the 1960s. The entire system was designed to work with special-purpose cores and to use memristors as a universal memory architecture. The entire system would be tied together through extensive use of silicon photonics. It was bold, ambitious, and cutting-edge. And now, it’s pretty much dead... Instead of a special-purpose OS (dubbed Linux++ last year and meant to help mimic memristor and photonic design of the platform in software), it’ll simply run a version of Linux. The problem, apparently, was memristors, which HP hasn’t found a way to produce in commercial volume or at a reasonable price.

Given the hard work the futurologists did coming up with all those spiffy neologisms, I daresay The Machine may still find its way to credulous consumers and eventual profitability in the late-nite technommercial arena. The way, after all, has been paved already:

It pays to remember that all the breathless "trouble" Hillary Clinton's campaign is presumably in over her e-mail server and the breathless unexpected presumable "seriousness" and "authenticity" of the Donald Trump campaign are both absolutely and entirely media confections whipped up by an irresponsible and superficial for-profit infotainment complex in order to grab bored eyeballs in the dog days of a summer a whole year before the campaigns begin in earnest.

While it might seem like a pretty good word to describe an unreal and unrealistic cartoon gizmo, "Hyperloop" seems to me even more like a perfectly good word to describe the cycle in which futurists regurgitate never-realized and never-realistic cartoon gizmos every few years pretending they're new and revolutionary.

Thursday, August 20, 2015

It may not seem like it, but this week has seen the most significant development yet in the immigration debate’s role in the 2016 election. I’d go even farther -- it’s possible that the entire presidential election just got decided... [O]n immigration... [Republicans] need to talk tough to appeal to their base in the primaries, but doing so risks alienating the Hispanic voters they’ll need in the general election... After Donald Trump released his immigration plan, which includes an end to birthright citizenship -- stating that if you were born in the United States but your parents were undocumented, you don’t get to be a citizen -- some of his competitors jumped up to say that they agreed... Remember all the agonizing Republicans did about how they had to reach out to Hispanic voters? They never figured out how to do it, and now they’re running in the opposite direction... Here is the list of Republican candidates who have at least suggested openness to ending birthright citizenship, which would mean repealing the 14th Amendment to the Constitution: Donald Trump, Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, John Kasich, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Lindsey Graham, and Rick Santorum. That’s nearly half the GOP field, and more may be added to the list... [N]o matter who gets elected in 2016, birthright citizenship is not going to be eliminated. The bar is so high for amending the Constitution that it’s impossible to imagine any amendment this controversial getting ratified, which is as it should be. But the political impact is going to be very real, whether or not the idea goes anywhere in practical terms. The simple fact is that if Republicans don’t improve their performance among Hispanic voters, they cannot win the White House. Period. This discussion about birthright citizenship sends an incredibly clear message to Hispanic voters, a message of naked hostility to them and people like them. I promise you that next fall, there are going to be ads like this running all over the country, and especially on Spanish-language media:

“My name is Lisa Hernandez. I was born in California, grew up there. I was valedictorian of my high school class, graduated from Yale, and now I’m in medical school; I’m going to be a pediatrician. But now Scott Walker and the Republicans say that because my mom is undocumented, that I’m not a real American and I shouldn’t be a citizen. I’m living the American Dream, but they want to take it away from me and people like me. Well I’ve got a message for you, Governor Walker. I’m every bit as American as your children. This country isn’t about who your parents were, it’s about everybody having a chance to work hard, achieve, and contribute to our future. It seems like some people forgot that.”

When a hundred ads like that one are blanketing the airwaves, the Republicans can say, “Wait, I support legal immigration!” all they want, but it won’t matter. Hispanic voters will have heard once again -- and louder than ever before -- that the GOP doesn’t like them and doesn’t want them... [A]ccording to exit polls Mitt Romney got 27 percent of Hispanic votes in 2012, while John McCain got 31 percent in 2008. Under a more likely scenario, with an electorate that votes something like in 2012 but with African-American turnout reduced, the Republican would need 47 percent of the Hispanic vote. In their worst-case scenario for Republicans -- an electorate that votes identically to the way it did in 2012, but adjusted for changes in population -- the Republican would need a stunning 52 percent of Hispanic votes. So to sum up: even in the best possible situation when it comes to turnout and the vote choices of the rest of the electorate, the Republican presidential candidate in 2016 is going to have to pull off an absolutely heroic performance among Hispanic voters if he’s going to win. That seemed awfully unlikely a week ago. How likely does it seem today?

I said much the same thing about Romney nearly a year before that election, and then as now the real worry I had was that Democrats win the White House in a way that gives them coattails to have some purchase on Congress, without which Republican obstructionism will amount to neo-nullification whatever mandate American majorities offer the Democrats to fight austerity, climate-change, racism, gun-violence, forced-pregnancy zealotry, and neocon warmongering.

The usual "Conservative" Basic Income Guarantee (ConBIG) proposal is a big con: a promise of bare subsistence is offered up in exchange for a program of radical deregulation and social program demolition. Exactly as usual, a recipe for feudalism is being peddled as emancipation.

Sunday, August 16, 2015

Salon's Scott Timberg is excited by the upcoming series 'Westworld' coming to HBO in 2016. Nothing wrong with that. I saw the trailer and made a mental mark in the chamber of my memory palace where I keep coming geek attractions myself. I enjoyed the campy nonsense of the original (although I would certainly have chosen being a aristocrat in the Roman world for my own vacation, all Bacchanals and farces and drunken symposia, and leave the gun-fight fantasies to ammosexual hicks from the neo-Confederate Styx), but I notice that despite his excitement for the upcoming series Timberg has no warmth of feeling for the original without which it would never have occurred to HBO's innovative cerebrative creatives that the world needed another gritty ponderous re-boot. Of this original, Timberg rolls his eyes,

On the surface, [the new Westworld] hardly has a perfect pedigree: The show is based on a 1973 movie, directed by Michael Crichton, about “the ultimate resort... where you can live out your every fantasy” including “lawless violence on the American frontier of the 1880s.” Starring James Brolin and a scarily robotic Yul Brenner, it’s a world -- as a robotic voiceover tells us -- “where nothing can possibly go wrong.” (Until it suddenly, spectacularly does.) Our guess is that HBO’s show will feel less like the 1973 film and a bit more like “Ex Machina” and “The Matrix.” (Something about the upcoming show’s catchprase -- “Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” -- also makes me think of Philip K. Dick and Keanu Reeves in a trench coat.) We don’t know a whole lot of details yet, but here are a few things I like about this “dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the future of sin.” It’s executive produced by J.J. Abrams and co-created by Jonathan Nolan (who has co-written several screenplays with brother Christopher and wrote the story on which the film “Memento” was based.) It stars heavy hitters including Anthony Hopkins (who appears to be playing the sinister Yul Brenner role in this one), Evan Rachel Wood, Thandie Newton, and Jeffrey Wright.

I quite like Hopkins, Newton, and Wright, and tend to agree that better actors are better than worse actors if one is hoping to be entertained by acting, but the hopeful genuflection to dudebro guru Christopher Nolan and his parade of prosthetic peen makes my own heart sink a bit. Bring on the gravelly voice and the gritty stage set, lets get some whining white guys in here, there are existential crises that need wrestling with!

And you will forgive a little eye-rolling of my own at Timberg's tidy conceit which would contrast the superficial charms ["On the surface..."] of the robotic Fantasy Island premise of the classic with the presumed "depths" of yet another sfnal invitation to "question the nature of your reality" via AI and virtuality. When Timberg insinuates that "something" in all this is making him think of Philip K. Dick and "The Matrix" I would propose it might be the sledgehammer pounding away with visual and verbal and atmospheric Dickian Matrixian cues just short of having characters literally facing the camera and screaming "Philip K. Dick!" and "The Matrix!" throughout the trailer. All of which is fine: All genres have their recurring motifs and signature moves, after all. But I really must protest the implication that the question every pale male undergraduate in Philosophy 101 who has ever smoked a joint inevitably asks himself -- namely: "dood! like what IS reality?" -- is hardly the tell-tale indication that we have stumbled into a film of ideas. To wit, what IS hamburger? Let's ask this A1 philosopher:

Frankly, there is very little substance to distinguish that gaudy 70s boilerplate about "liv[ing] out your every fantasy" and "lawless violence" and the 21st century conjuration of "the future of sin." It is only, I believe, in the framing of this promise of scenic sinning (the promise of film promotion since the birth of film) by reference to "the dawn of artificial consciousness" that we find the excuse for the pretense that with "Westworld" we find ourselves in the province of deep philosophical speculation and urgently timely political debate. Did I mention timely?

"And did I mention how timely [Westworld] is?" asks Timberg, breathlessly, at this point. "[T]he impact of advanced technology on the post-industrial world is one of the most crucial topics of our time," he intones piously, just the way the futurists have taught us to do by now. Of course, what makes technology "advanced" would presumably be the way it solves hitherto intractable shared problems rather than facilitating our exploitation, making us unhappy or unhealthy, poisoning our planet beyond healing, or, you know, threatening to kill us. Shorn of explicit norms and stakeholders references to "technological advance" really amount to facile retreats into complacent technological determinism and self-congratulatory manifest destiny, reactionary narratives of technoscientific change and historical struggle that have long been the specialty of futurological discourse. Their pernicious politics aside, though, here I just want to remind us all how reductive, how insensitive, how inattentive, how uncritical, how lacking in memory, how -- in a word -- stupid such narratives frankly turn out to be, however useful and consoling they may be to incumbent elites. Remember, this is a piece extolling the high-voltage Ideas we may expect from the new "Westworld."

Timberg declares himself to be "still smarting from [a] recent Barbara Ehrenreich [piece] which argued that "the job-eating maw of technology now threatens even the nimblest and most expensively educated... Tasks that would seem to require a distinctively human capacity for nuance are increasingly assigned to algorithms, like the ones currently being introduced to grade essays on college exams." To this he appends the exclamation: "There’s never been a better time to look at this stuff." By which he means, let us be clear, there's never been a better time to watch the new Westworld! "Smarting" is not the same thing as being in any way made smarter, to put the point bluntly. What Barbara Ehrenreich knows that Scott Timberg has failed to grasp or feel is worthy of our attention is that "technology" is not a "job-eating maw" by any means. Behind the cloudbank of that overgeneralization are all the pesky details that make sense of the problem Ehrenreich is exposing here and without which we cannot gain the collective purchase actually to solve that problem. The productivity gains that have accompanied automation over the last two generations have not lead to higher compensation and shorter work-weeks only because that process of automation coincided historically with the right-wing demolition of organized labor and the retreat of the Democratic party from its New Deal and Great Society ideals ad constitutencies. Majorities supported by secure entitlements and bargaining power would not be threatened by "technology" (the monolithic construal of which in any case makes intelligent discussion of the stakeholder struggles and dynamisms of technoscientific change almost impossible in any case), and in a world that responded to shared needs and problems rather than the demands of minute plutocratic minorities for ever more wealth and profit we would not be bedeviled by the "assign[ment] to algorithms... [of] tasks... requir[ing] a distinctively human capacity for nuance" because the plain fact is that these algorithms fail to perform well at anything other than making the rich richer. That is to say, the glib framing of these Big Ideas as matters of "the dawn of artificial intelligence" and "the impact of advanced technology" is a distraction not an engagement with the actual matter at hand, the evocation of a comic-book terrain of villains and superheroes behind which real stakeholders with very recognizable and utterly familiar stakes and positions vanish from our contemplation, the displacement of the fraught but promising terrain of political struggles onto a spectacle of mythological destinies playing out for our mute witness and acquiescence. Feeling smarter yet?

Not to pick on the fellow, but Scott Timberg's on a roll here. If you think de-contextualized a-political loose talk of the threat of "automation" makes the new Westworld must-see tee vee for techbros, well, let's raise the pitch to even higher heights, and I'm talking TED-talk heights, I'm talking Thought-Leader heights! "Even closer to the show’s premise: Just a few weeks ago, more than 1,000 scientists signed an open letter arguing for the banning of AI-driven weaponry. 'Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is -- practically if not legally -- feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high,' reads the letter signed by Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Steve Wozniak..." Not to put too fine a point on it, this statement is either a vacuity or a lie. Expert systems and user-friendly software interfaces that get called "AI" are indeed both practically and legally feasible and have been for as long as most of Scott Timberg's readers have been living. These systems always have and will continue to cause problems -- security problems, problems of inscrutability, errors, brittleness, cruft, and so on. Not one of these real problems is or ever has been remotely illuminated by the conventional recourse to metaphors of computer intelligence, personhood, paradise, apocalypse, villainy, rapture or godhood made by alienated True Believing GOFAI coders or filthy-rich drama-diva venture capitalists who like to fancy themselves indispensable protagonists of historically revolutionary and transcendent dramas. Steven Hawking has spent the last decade trying to recapture former glory by casting himself in the mode of one time inventor now impresario and guru-wannabe Ray Kurzweil, Steve Wozniak in failing to get his head on Mount Rushmore with consummate used car salesman Steve Jobs is happy for the attention of an open letter or a stint on Kathy Griffin's reality show, anything, while Elon Musk knows there is as much money to be made from government contracts to deal with public hazards whomped up from techno-alarmism as there is to be made from the consumer rubes with false promises of techno-paradise incarnated in whatever landfill destined gizmo or low-earth-orbit amusement park ride he is peddling at the moment.

It seems strange to me, to say the least, to identify this sort of talk with "philosophy" or even, really, ideas at all, but I blame the ascendancy of futurological discourse with this general dumbing down of what passes for public deliberation into promotional and self-promotional activities among venture capitalists and those who serve them. I mean, if you're going to pretend robot cultist Nick Bostrom's handwaving about the existential threat of killer robots and satanic AIs (as opposed to the, he says, overblown non-threat of ongoing and upcoming anthropogenic climate catastrophe) is "philosophy," -- as Salon has also been quite happy to countenance already, as I have criticized, among other places, here -- then hell, why NOT say "Westworld" or is a Film of Ideas?

How's this for a conventional futurological confusion of science fiction for science fact? What we have here must another Film of Ideas, right guys?

Given that the confident promise of artificially intelligent computers and slavebots has been part of the furniture of the filmic future pretty much since legibly sfnal films have found their way to our screens and given that the conceit of artificial intelligence gone wrong and slavebots run amok has been a go-to hairball sfnal scriptwriters have coughed up to propel their narratives pretty much just as long, one really has to wonder just how it can be that otherwise perfectly sane and sensitive adults can continue to pretend that there is anything the least bit original or provocative about this premise. I would be hard-pressed to find a single year in my post-adolescent life in which there has not been at least one major motion picture or television series playing out this incessant scenario. As I have written endlessly often here and elsewhere, completely cocksure champions of good old fashioned AI (GOFAI) keep on predicting that their AI is just around the corner, generation after generation, year after year, day after day, without fail, er, that is to say, with nothing but fail, failure after failure, a faith in the force of the AI promise driving vast corporate-military R&D and advertizing budgets and matching the faith in the demonic AI premise driving vast attentional resources of Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

I realize that the GOFAI dead-enders will pout and stamp that the fact that AI keeps on not panning out doesn't mean that it never will (a pretty frail hook to hang one's hat on I must say), but it really does surprise me a bit that the GOFAI crowd rarely seems to qualify the ferocious confidence of their expectation given all this serial failure, or take a pause in which to consider how the reductively calculating disembodied sociopathic models of intelligence that inevitably freight their conceptions may have something to do with all this failure. I imagine that the fantasies of AI for those who devote so much of their intelligent lives and affect to their contemplation are providing psychic compensations and satisfactions (stereotypes of body-loathing, narcissistic, sociopathic theory-heads trembling in denial of the contingency, rejection, error, mortality in human life are there for a reason), just as I imagine the hoary conceits of robocalypse remain provocative in their dreary staleness because they speak to the perennial alienation and anomie of everyday people coping with the head-breaking complexities and heart-breaking complicities of late-industrial consumer societies.

"What are the chances of a TV series capturing all of this?" Timberg ponders withh curious wistfulness. "Not terribly good, even on HBO," he concludes. Why so desolate, Scott? Box-office flop Transcendence managed to say all that crap and much more in a couple of hours, after all! TV series "capturing all of this" futurological wonder and genius are, believe me, a dime a dozen. That "Westworld" can regurgitate all the usual Terminator, Battlestar Galactica, Matrix conceits seems to me quite good, even terribly good, if I may say so. Hell, sleepwalkers could write that stuff at this point -- "even on HBO"!

A spectacle of "Future" scenery isn't a film of ideas, just as a futurological scenario isn't really a form of analysis or critique. (For a more elaborated account of this position read my Futurological Discourses and Posthuman Terrains.) As I have said, I'm as much a fanboy as the next queergeek. I'll be watching "Watchworld." Explosions and blinking consoles and Holodeck adventures and talking robots and catsuits and floating monorail tracks between Deco ziggurats (well, you know what I mean), what's not to like? But it isn't actually true in my view that a cliche-soaked action movie becomes a "Film of Ideas" just because it is also notionally science fictional and has cellos playing drawn-out low notes in the theme music. It's not that science fiction can't be genuinely philosophical (Tarkovsky, anyone?) or politically relevant or thought provoking or emotionally engaging. It's just that you cannot expect me to take philosophically seriously anyone who confuses marketing for thinking, who confuses the stale for the original, who confuses denial with inquiry. When science fiction is rich and provocative and affecting it is so for the same reasons that other literary works are: the ideas are wedded to plots in unexpected ways, the conjured worlds are authentically complicated and multivalent, the characters solicit our empathy and understanding in their differences. It remains to be seen if the new HBO "Westworld" will be entertaining, let alone, more than that. I'm hoping for something fun, and will be quite pleasantly surprised if something more than fun is on offer, but you can be sure I know enough to actually know what I'm seeing whatever that may be. If you are losing the capacity to make the relevant distinctions to know as much, I fear neoliberal futurology deserves much of the blame for it.

Thursday, August 13, 2015

"Well, maybe I’m not objective when it comes to Planned Parenthood, [but] one of the reasons you find most of their clinics in black neighborhoods is so that you can find ways to control that population.”

Needless to say, forced pregnancy zealots like Ben Carson want to destroy Planned Parenthood precisely to undermine the autonomy and control the bodies of women of color.

Upgraded and edited from the Moot to this post about basic income advocates who see it as a way to abolish the minimum wage, friend of blog "Lorraine" writes:

The whole idea that minimum wage can or should be eliminated rests on marginalist assumptions such as the mythical "zero marginal productivity" worker. The freshwater economists and their allies who promote these concepts are overtly hostile toward wage-earning people of both high and low income levels and any income support programs whose parameters are acceptable to them should most certainly be regarded as Trojan Horses.

We share a suspicion of those who pretend indifference to the differences between basic income advocates of the left (who see it as part of a program for social justice, what I call equity-in-diversity) against those of the right (who see it as part of a program of "efficient" deregulation, privatization, and eventual precarization).

So, it will be no surprise that I strongly agree with your choice of the rhetoric of the "Trojan Horse" here.

It is nothing short of a tell when someone claims to want BIG not to supplement but to replace minimum wage laws.

Coupling "basic" guaranteed income to demolition of standards guaranteeing equity -- and this goes too for those who claim healthcare, education, legal representation and so on would no longer be a right for those "unworthies" who mis-manage their BIG so as to no longer have recourse to these privatized services -- ensures that what a "basic" income would amount to is the provision of subsistence, as understood no doubt by incumbent elites.

What this means in substance is that right-wing as well as market libertarian (who are also right-wing, of course, despite their incessant protestations that they are "beyond left and right") advocates of BIG are commandeering the emancipatory aspirations of left advocates of BIG in the service of a re-establishment of feudalism.

This is the same old story it is always is with the likes of them, and exactly what anyone would expect who wasn't distracted/deluded in the usual manner by the neoliberal/futurological shiny object of a new-fangled policy technofix.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Re-assembling a twitter stream with many participants and argumentative strands into a legible conversation seems to me to require a little chronological hanky-panky (since in real time people are jumping into and responding to points from earlier on or because finishing a point sometimes you lose track of the thrust of the conversation more generally and so on), but while straying from strict chronology can render a twitterscrum more intelligible it can also open one to suspicions of editorial embellishment and special pleading. I hope that none of the contributors to this conversation feel themselves to be misused or misrepresenated by this reconstruction. Comments, criticisms, questions, elaborations are all welcome as always.

Paramilitary response to planned, peaceful commemoration -- declaration of a state of emergency after a violent police-involved incident -- mass arrest of peaceful protestors, including many high profile activists and teachers -- escalation, escalation, escalation! -- prayerful thoughts of this atheist go to the righteous activists in policy custody and suffering people living in the white-racist police state of Furguson and St. Louis.